DNA solves a mystery
 

I have just watched a really interesting programme on TV. In the early 1960s some children found a new born baby, wrapped in news papers, abandoned on a pathway. I remember when it happened as it was big news at the time.
The baby was adopted, but has recently turned to a researcher to see if they could trace her parents.
And DNA did it!
It turns out her mother had at least nine children, seven of them adopted out, and this was not the first baby she had abandoned. She raised the last two children with their father, her third husband.

https://www.msn.com/en-nz/news/natio...?ocid=msedgntp

There have been a few TV programmes along those lines in the UK, Chris - "Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace".

Another big shock for me, once dna could prove who the abandoning mother was, was to find out that the mother was not some terrified teenager as I had always assumed, but very often a woman, either married or mother of several, who just couldn't be bothered with the adoption paperwork.I

I know, I know, walk a mile in their shoes before I judge, but I struggle to find any excuse for them.

OC

I think you have to bear in mind that post-natal depression can cause some very irrational behaviour.

Mary, yes indeed, but that wasn't a factor in any of the cases I have seen. At least two of them involved the male partner. One was the husband. They just did not want the baby.

OC

Also I think the lack of financial independence and inequality on who is left holding the baby for want of a better term. I would expect in all cases it was the woman and the men just went off and did anything they liked, plus before 1967 the lack of contraception for single women and legal abortion.

Both unmarried and married women had hard decisions to make when it came to children and families.

I am glad those days are over and it wasn't that long ago at all it was like that when I was born and I can say that I had experience of the fallout as a child of an unmarried mother in the 1950s,1960s and 1970s both financially and from society in general.

Maggie

Your mum.must have been a very strong woman to have kept you and I take my hat off to her. I well remember those attitudes, so vicious.

OC

Yes with a lot of support from her mother my Nanny and her sisters their husbands and also her brothers and their wives.

A lot of women didn't and don't have that support and we can never know what they go through physically and emotionally some not even being able to look after themselves let alone babies and small children.